they would receive the news of my
failure with unqualified satisfaction. I therefore prosecuted my
inquiries in every possible direction, sparing myself neither labour nor
pains. It would appear that the victim, an old man, was without kith or
kin. He was very poor, and lived by himself in a small villa on the
outskirts of the city. No one had been seen near the house on the night
in question, nor had any noise been heard by the neighbours. Yet in the
morning he was discovered lying on the floor of the front-room, stabbed
to the heart from behind. Now every detective knows--indeed it is part
of his creed--that, in an affair such as I am describing, nothing is too
minute or too trivial to have a bearing upon the case. The old gentleman
had been at supper when the crime was committed, and from the fact that
the table was only laid for one, I argued that he had not expected a
visitor. The murderer could not have been hungry, for the food had not
been touched. That the motive was not robbery was also plain from the
fact that not a drawer had been opened or a lock forced, while the money
in his pocket was still intact. The doctors had certified that the wound
could not have been self-inflicted, while there was plenty of evidence
to show that there had not been a struggle. From the fact that the
front-door was locked, and that the key was in the murdered man's
pocket, it was certain that the assassin must have left the house by the
back. There was one question, however, so trivial in itself that one
might have been excused for not taking note of it, that attracted my
attention. As I have said, the old man had been stabbed from behind, and
when he was discovered by the police next day, his overturned chair was
lying beside him. This, to my mind, showed that he had been seated with
his back to the door when the crime had been perpetrated. When I had
examined everything else, I turned my attention to the chair. I did not
expect it to tell me anything, yet it was from it that I obtained the
clue that was ultimately to lead to the solution of the whole mystery.
The chair was a cheap one, made of white wood, and had the usual smooth
strip of wood at the top. On the back of this piece of wood, a quarter
of an inch or so from the bottom, on the left-hand side, was a faint
smear of blood. The presence of the blood set me thinking. When found,
the chair had been exactly eighteen inches from the body. The mere fact
that the man had been